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After this past weekend I said to myself, I can't wait to go back to work and get some rest. Ha. Ha ha. That was stupid.
At about 8:30 this muggy Monday morning, I got a call from the lovely and talented Ronda down in our Georgia office. "You know we're out, right? But said in her great Georgia accent that I couldn't even begin to type out phonetically here so you could get some idea of it. I am a sucker for accents anyway. And while Ronda's southern accent is great, I think my favorite accent on a woman is either Irish or Scottish. I think it dates back to the movie Caddyshack. For some reason I was smitten with Maggie's accent. And, apropos of nothing, I just found out that Maggie was played by the same actress that played Pinto's underage girlfriend in Animal House. So there ya go, at least this digression had an actual useful fact in it (unless, of course, you already knew that fact).
So where was I? Oh yeah. Georgia is down. What that means is that they can't get to the hopelessly outdated mainframe that runs our hopelessly outdated order processing software and they can't get to our relatively new Windows 2000 server that runs our relatively recent version of Exchange Server 2000. So they really can't do anything. I start to ask the usual troubleshooting questions as I start to get this weird feeling in my stomach. Usually, I can ask a couple of questions and figure what happened and get the problem repaired pretty quickly. But the answers I was getting were leading me down a path I didn't like. The path of failed equipment. Then I got the answer all computer guys dread. "Why, yes there was a thunderstorm recently. It was just last night. And, as you can probably guess, they had a power outage in the plant. Which almost invariably means power surge.
What happened was that one of the ports on our Netscreen firewall/VPN box got fried. I ordered another one to be shipped overnight directly to the Georgia plant. But that still leaves them without any real connectivity for the rest of the day and however long it takes tomorrow to get the thing up and running. I think I take my work a little too personally, because I know that after ordering the replacement, there really isn't anything else that I can do. But it just bothers me that they are down. Like it is my fault or something. I think I have to bite the bullet and keep one of these boxes as a spare just in case.
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